


Swans Down

by KingOuija



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Do Not Archive (The Magnus Archives), F/M, Feeding, Femdom, Finger Sucking, G but a weird G, dirt eating, kinky smarm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-26
Updated: 2019-11-26
Packaged: 2021-02-26 19:07:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,216
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21563617
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KingOuija/pseuds/KingOuija
Summary: Daisy feeds Jon an entire birthday cake.
Relationships: Jonathan Sims/Alice “Daisy” Tonner
Comments: 16
Kudos: 84





	Swans Down

It was Jon's thirtieth birthday. He realized this when Daisy brought him a cake.

"I took a look through the personnel files when I hired myself," Daisy said in explanation. "I was the one who tracked everyone's birthdays when Basira and I were with the force." 

It was a strange dichotomy--the same woman carrying out extrajudicial killings in the woods and maintaining a Google sheet of everyone's favorite desserts. 

Daisy laid the cake on his desk, as he hastily cleared away statements and file folders to give her room. It had been wobbling slightly in her still-wasted arms, and she'd carried it in on a tray--for better presentation?--courting a mess. Taking a closer look, Jon saw it was a conglomeration of four different cakes, two slices of each flavor. 

At his comment, she responded, "I don't know what you like and didn't want to ruin the surprise. And this way, everyone will find something they like." 

"I.…erm. I don't think Melanie would be keen on a work party right now, to be honest. And I can't really see Basira going for it, either." Jon pressed his fingers into his eyes. "And forget about Martin," he muttered. As though he could. 

"I'll get them on board." Daisy gave a frustrated sigh. "I know everyone's trapped, but we're not _obligated_ to be miserable all the time." 

Instead of leaving, though, she threw herself into Jon's other chair, reaching into her pocket for a handful of plastic forks, and scattering them across his desktop. 

Tim had tracked birthdays, Jon recalled, delivering cupcakes, crackers, small gifts, until he hadn't. Jon should have taken over, but it was just another thing it had never occurred to him to do. He'd used to think the little things were meaningless for being little, but then the sight of Daisy with a cake made his ribs want to cave into his chest, so he'd clearly been wrong. 

Daisy chucked him lightly on the chin. "That goes for you, too, Jon. Wipe that grim expression off your face." 

It was still a little disconcerting to hear her call him by his first name. He wasn't sure whether he was smiling at that thought, or at her exhortation to be less grim, but she smiled back. 

"You know what? We don't need anyone else. I'll help you eat it." 

"I'm not even sure I--" 

A forkful of vanilla buttercream and-- 

"Here's some lemon, for your sour little face." 

\--was thrust into his open mouth. He reflexively closed his mouth around the fork. Jon let the bite of cake melt on his tongue as Daisy pulled the fork loose and turned to contemplate the next forkful. 

"Daisy, I--this isn't what I thought you meant by 'I'll help you--'" 

And another bite of cake was shoved into him. Dark, fine-crumbed chocolate, with a note of espresso. 

Jon swallowed. "That one's quite good, actually. The lemon didn't taste like much, except sugar." 

"It's hard to get lemon cake right," Daisy replied. "Too lemony and it tastes like floor cleaner." 

"Well, it wasn't--" Predictably, Daisy took advantage of Jon's open mouth to shovel in another forkful of cake. He couldn't really distinguish the flavor of this one around the chocolate frosting still coating the inside of his mouth. From the color, it was spice cake or carrot cake. 

Enough of this, Jon decided, reaching for Daisy's fork. He was thirty _goddamn_ years old, and would not be subject to the airplane game. 

She seized his wrist in her free hand, forcing it to the side, and the fork came at his face again. Rather than have her dirty his face or spill the cake down the front of his shirt, he opened his mouth and took the bite. 

"Can you guess what flavor that one is?" 

He caught the wrist of her fork-hand in his before daring to open his mouth again. "I don't know, Daisy. Cherry? Almond?" 

"Want to keep guessing?" She was in a very odd mood. Glitteringly merry. 

He raised his eyebrows. "Not really." 

"Amaretto." 

"Amaretto is almond." 

She shrugged. "Have it your way." 

"While you're granting me liberties, will I be allowed to feed myself?" 

"No. No, I don't think so." 

Jon blinked. Well, there wasn't much he could say to that. He let go of her right wrist to reach for the plastic forks, and she quickly grabbed the wrist of that hand as well, holding both in her left. 

She grinned at him challengingly, showing teeth sharp and white, undulled by months packed away in the earth. 

"I don't think you've been taking care of yourself. You're too skinny." Jon recognized her tone as motherish, though he couldn't remember his mother, or even his grandmother ever saying anything of the kind. But, unmotherishly, she was climbing onto his lap. 

"Daisy…" 

"It's cool, Jon." And she was definitely being cool about it, herself. Jon was at a loss. She wasn't a particularly large woman, nor were her hands. Her fingers, though they held his wrists with pinching tightness, didn't meet around them. He could pull away easily. 

Probably. 

And Daisy accusing him of being 'too skinny' was ridiculous. Her own thighs barely weighted down his own. Yes, she'd locked her feet together somewhere around the back of his chair, but, again, it'd be an easy hold to wriggle out of. Hell, he could probably lift her straight up and off him, as coffin-thin as she was. 

Probably. 

"I've been keeping an eye out since we came out of the Buried, and I noticed you don't eat." Her eyes met his with disarming seriousness. They were greenish blue, clear now of the grit-rubbed redness that had lingered after she'd first come out. His heart sped in his chest. _She knows._

"Not so much as a baby carrot." _She can't possibly._ "You carry around that bottle, but I looked, and it's only water." 

_The last one--the last one--was the night we came out. She was in no shape to..._

He rolled his eyes, studied detachment. "Would you rather it was gin or something?" 

"I'd rather you eat." She unlocked her legs so she could shift and turn to load her fork with another bite of cake. "This was the one you liked best, wasn't it?" 

"Yes." 

Daisy was done hastily shoveling cake into his open mouth like a carnival game. The fork approached his lips and hovered patiently in front of them as she waited for him to be ready. 

He obediently took a bite, though he tried to express with his eyes alone how far above this ridiculous situation he was. This was _her_ game, and it was a very stupid game. 

She smiled, eyes on his lips. May, in fact, have entirely missed his eloquent expression. "Well done," she said as warmly as Jon had ever heard her say anything. 

"W-well, it may have been a while," Jon said, the astringency of his voice trying to cover the silly thrill her praise had called up in his chest, "but I think I can handle chewing and swallowing." 

She turned, loading the fork with a larger bite. The cavity in the side of the slice was getting big. 

"I don't know how long I was down there before I started eating the dirt." 

The cake felt like sand in his throat as he swallowed. He opened his mouth to ask her a question, then realized he had nothing to say. She grinned at his speechlessness. He looked for the dark lines of grit between her teeth he'd noticed in Karolina Górka's mouth, but saw only the ordinary pink of her gums. 

"The only sense I had of time passing was becoming hungrier and hungrier." Another forkful. He opened his mouth for it, because he still had nothing to add. "But we both know it's not _hunger_. Not really. It's just the closest human analogue." 

Daisy _knew._ She had to know, didn't she? The hair rose on the back of his neck. But, at the same time, she hissed and let go his wrists, flexing her fingers and shaking her wrist loose. If she knew, she'd never let him go. Nervously, he folded his arms over his stomach. 

Bite after bite came at him at a constant pace as she went on. "This'll sound ridiculous, but eating dirt kept me sane. It gave me something to do with myself when I couldn't see or hear anything meaningful, couldn't feel for the pressure all around me, when I felt like I was coming apart into the earth. Like I was nothing but skinless misery saturating the dirt. I could open my mouth and let the dirt fall into it, and it'd be something _different._ " 

Daisy paused there, and looked at him for a long moment like this was a point she needed him to understand. So Jon thought about it, and found he could easily imagine being so desperate for something different he'd welcome the grit on his tongue, the sludge trickling down the back of his throat to his belly. 

Very delicately, she turned to the cake and teased the narrow end of the wedge loose, scooped it up on her fork and brought it toward him. 

"I wondered later why that's what I chose to remind myself I existed. Why I didn't hurt myself some other way." He opened his mouth, hungry for whatever revelation she was building to. "I could have pulled every hair in my head out one at a time. I could have wounded myself and waited to heal." He swallowed. 

Daisy turned to the desk and rotated the platter so the second piece of chocolate-espresso cake was closest to her, then dug in. Jon half-expected her to eat this one herself, but she turned back to him and raising her hand to his chin, encouraged him to open his mouth. The frosting-coated pieces were harder to swallow, clinging to the back of his tongue, but he was hardly going to protest at this point. 

"I ate because that's what people do to stay alive. We sleep, too, but I couldn't sleep down there. Didn't shit or anything." She frowned thoughtfully. "I'm not sure why, actually. Maybe the Buried didn't want us sullying it. I breathed. I think my heart beat. But that kept happening without my having to decide. Eating was a conscious decision I made to stay human. It anchored me. It helped me remember being human. Basira, my life…." 

"I.…think," he swallowed around the thickness in his throat, "I think I understand. In any case, I'm in no position to pass judgement on your choice of….sustenance under such duress." 

Daisy looked down thoughtfully toward the diamond formed by their crossed thighs. Her brow was wrinkled when she looked up. "What does that mean?" 

"What?" 

"'You're in no position to pass judgment…?'" 

So Daisy didn't know. Jon hoped desperately she'd go on and make a stab at his meaning he could nod along with. But she waited patiently instead. 

"Just that it's preferable," he began haltingly, "to feeding the Hunt. Or the Eye." 

That was it. Maybe the Eye had actually provided him the inspiration, because her eyes brightened. Now that he had the thread again, she went back to feeding him cake. "Exactly. Exactly. How do I put it…." 

He wasn't any help. The last forkful had been mostly frosting. 

"Even if the rituals we kept when we were human stop actually sustaining us--eating, sleeping, showering…." 

"Listening to dull Radio 4 soaps?" 

Daisy gave him a forbidding look and punished him with an extra-big glob of cake. 

"No, like celebrating birthdays," she said pointedly. "Even if we don't give a shit anymore, we have to keep doing them as….I don't know. Maintenance. To keep ourselves from dissolving." 

Was that what was happening to him? Jon wondered. Dissolution? Routines first, then standards, morals, the load bearing parts of his personality sagging, collapsing against each other into a strange, humped shape that would, eventually, only be recognizable by a few inconsequential details. The shape of his glasses perhaps, or, if there came a time he didn't need them, the silver of his hair. 

"Get back here, Sims," she ordered, squeezing his cheeks between her hands. So it was back to Sims, then. He didn't mind. 

"I can hardly go anywhere with you sitting on me." 

"You're going into your head. That's the opposite of what I'm telling you to do." 

"What _are_ you telling me to do?" 

"Eat the cake." 

They finished the slice. 

"That's a whole quarter of the cake," Daisy said, sounding startled and, unfairly, a bit judgmental. 

"That's my share, I guess. Two pieces for each of us." 

"It's your cake, though. I bought it for you. You could have more, if you like." 

"For goodness--I didn't want _that_ much!" 

"How much did you want?" 

"None!" 

"You could've said something." They were much too close for the upward twitch of Daisy's lips to go unnoticed. 

"I thought that was implied by your having to wrestle me into submission." 

"Huhn," she said, thoughtfully, "how are you feeling?" 

"Annoyed. Sick of cake." 

"Literally sick, though?" 

"No." Jon recognized suddenly how unusual that was. Food no longer fed him--he supposed it made an odd kind of sense an excess of it no longer made him ill. 

"If you can eat another piece, you'll have eaten over a third of it." 

"And then, if I have another, it'll be a half." He hoped his tone conveyed his contempt for the idea. "Fun with fractions." 

"Let's go, Sims," Daisy said, determinedly. Her arm, pale and so thin veins stood out on her wrists, reached implacably toward the cake. 

"The amaretto was better than the lemon," Jon offered. The fork switched direction. 

Jon ate bite after bite, encouraged by Daisy's expression shifting from thoughtful to approving to almost tender as they worked away at it. Her free hand would rise from time to time, fingers turning his chin, thumb swiping a crumb from the corner of his mouth. His thighs were finally beginning to feel sore under her slight weight. Her spine began to waver, muscles tiring from holding herself erect for so long. His hands fell to her hips, holding her steady. 

Jon did not _know_ exactly what was inside him any longer. The same blood and tissue that had always composed him, some parts dormant, others active in new ways? Jared had said there was something odd about his bones, but quite possibly, if he were x-rayed or dissected, he'd appear completely normal. Maybe he'd confound the instruments. 

When Jon thought about it, he visualized the inside of himself as the life-sized resin torso that had stood in the corner of his year 5 science class. Specifically, the cavity left behind when the parts were taken out, with a plasticky snap, to be passed around the room. Now, all the hollow parts where his insides used to be were filling with cake. 

Being filled wasn't the same as being fed, but it created the same warmth and weight inside him. And, while it did nothing for the not-hunger, Daisy did. 

Jon couldn't remember spending such a protracted length of time staring at another person. The smile lines worn deep in the corners of her eyes--Daisy had been a joyful monster. Freckling on her nose and cheekbones faded by her long enclosure. The blue tracery of veins at her temples when she turned away from him. Odd how physical closeness and eye contact alone could create a hypnotic degree of intimacy without the need for any actual understanding. He had no idea what she was getting out of this. The Eye was quiet. He supposed it had no interest in this sort of thing. It could be something so personal and complex he had no hope of understanding it, or it could be as simple as her wanting to know how far he'd let her go. 

Halfway through a cake, apparently. 

"So, what do you think, Jon?" she said, fork thoughtfully held to her mouth. "Think there's room for the rest of it in there?" 

"In my stomach, no," he replied. "But I've still got two lungs, I suppose." He wrinkled his nose at the sound of his own voice, slightly slurred, the sugar coating his tongue making it heavy, sticking it against his palate. 

"That's the spirit," Daisy said warmly. She reached between them with her free hand and popped open the button at the top of his fly. 

Christ. _Fucking_ Christ. Jon's mouth fell open in shock and he closed it just as quickly. With no acknowledgment of what she'd just done, she turned to contemplate their next move. He must be red to his ears. The casual ownership of the gesture stole the breath from his lungs. 

"What do you think? Lemon next?" She asked, ignoring his obvious embarrassment. 

He didn't have to answer, fortunately. Another bite of cake approached his lips, and all that was required to open up for it. 

As she continued packing cake into him a bite at a time, the warmth at her casual handling expanded into an all-consuming giddiness. It wasn't a sugar rush--he was pretty sure his body wasn't digesting anything--but a deepening of the hypnosis of repetition. Of the gradual but steady ratcheting up of physical strain, skin tightening to the limit of his waistband and then pushing against it, zipper unhitching a tooth at a time. Of the IV drip drip drip of her approval into him. The warmth of her closeness. Her breath shivering his eyelashes. Her lip, bitten in her focus on him. The occasional light, directing touch at his jaw or the corner of his mouth. Her inescapable eyes. 

"Look at that," Daisy said at last and, though he was already looking, her fingers pushed his head gently in the direction she was indicating. "You did it, Jon." 

Wow. He _had_ done it. Except-- 

As if their thoughts were mingling through the medium of cake, she realized what he was thinking, and scraped her fingers through the ring of frosting that remained around the edge of the platter. 

He sucked the frosting from them shamelessly. Then kept sucking, his tongue exploring the pads of her fingers. His tongue, which he'd thought numbed by cake, tastebuds sanded flat, was so sensitive to her fingers, he could read her fingerprints, the notches of old scars cutting the whorls. 

The softness of Daisy's smile was the softness of his feeling. 

"Incredible," Daisy said, crooking her fingers to stroke his tongue in turn, "how many people can say they've eaten an entire cake in a single sitting?" 

Irritatingly, the Beholding chose that moment to supply a precise number, but he'd have to spit out her fingers to say anything, so chose not to. _I'll have to add it to my CV._

Basira and Melanie were surprised when Jon started sharing dinner with the group, but didn't protest the way he'd expected them to. Daisy's pleased smile went unnoticed--just for him, and beneath the table, their ankles intertwined. Jon didn't have to ask her birthday--the Beholding knew. Nor did he have to ask what she wanted.


End file.
